Day 1
I woke up to something tapping on the windows at 7am or so. The curtains were drawn, and I assumed it was just a window cleaning crew due to how loud the tapping was.

Well the tapping didn’t stop and it got more frequent, so I got out of bed to investigate. I was wrong. Very Wrong. There were raindrops slamming into the floor to ceiling windows. HUGE RAINDROPS. Apparently there was an AMBER level rainstorm hanging out over Hong Kong. Fantastic.

I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I went about my morning routing and got breakfast. Then I met with Elaine and we went shopping. We stopped at a tailor, uniqlo, an eyeglasses place, and caught a late lunch at a Shanghainese restaurant. After all this, I returned to the hotel, and crashed due to jetlag. I woke up around 8pm, found a random dinner joint, and fell back asleep.

Day 2.
It was still raining like crazy, but I ventured out in the morning. The first stop was Tsui Wah Restaurant for breakfast of buns with condensed milk and a noodle dish. I also made my way to the waterfront. The photo below is doctored… the visibility wasn’t this good.

This was the view from my booth at Tsui Wah. After I finished breakfast, I was going through my guide book, when two older ladies simply sat down in my booth. They asked if I was done, and said their booth was too cold. Hint taken…

Next I walked to the Hong Kong Cultural Center to pick up some tickets. The lobby was impressive.

The Cultural Center is conveniently located next to the Avenue of Stars.

^HK Cinema’s finest!

Also on the waterfront is the Museum of Art. Here’s some 油條

…and Chickens!

I made way back to TST Station to head over to Central.

Those aren’t Korean drama stars…

^They’re cram school instructors!!!

I wandered around some of the high rise towers in Central and checked out the HK International Finance Centre’s observation deck. Here, they had an exhibit to explain how HK printed money. The more interesting fact is that HK doesn’t print it’s own money. They let three different banks print their cash, so you could have a HSBC, Bank of China or Standard Charter Bank logo on your dollar bills.

Inside of the HSBC Building.

^much more impressive than the Boeing Everett site.


After this, a tourist from the mainland asked me how to get to the Central MTR station. I was headed there too, so we compared maps, figured out where we were, and found our ways to the station. From here I headed back to TST to meet Lawrence for dinner. We caught up and headed to the tourist trap that is the Temple Street Night Market and walked around Kowloon.

Taiwan night markets are still the best. That is all.